A chara, - There are many who would disagree with your assessment of John Redmond in 10 editorial (April 22nd). Any examination of Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party would find serious cracks in its "tolerance". Redmond certainly compromised, for all the good it did the Irish people or even his own party. His "negotiating skills" led him to agree in March 1914 to the "temporary exclusion" of six counties of Ulster from a Home Rule parliament and then to putting it on the back burner while he urged Irishmen to join the British army in September 1914. His "commitment to the democratic process" was such that he and his party ruthlessly pushed aside any other political organisation which might have challenged it in the early years of the century.
The Irish people as a whole, once they were given a serious choice, cast Mr Redmond and his party aside in favour of revolutionary politics at the 1918 general election. The democratic will of the people was overthrown in 1921 when Britain imposed two states in Ireland and the tragedy is that until democracy is restored by the holding of all Ireland elections with the British out of the equation the events of the last 26 years will recur. - is mise,
Brookview Terrace,
Jobstown,
Tallaght,
Dublin 24.